This course gives a student extensive hands-on practice in using the New
York University ACF computer system (IBM
PC, Mac, and ULTRIX/UNIX Vax) to implement Noam Chomsky's and Zellig Harris'
ideas about morphology, syntax, and semantics into symbolic processing languages
like Prolog, Lisp, Snobol, and so on. We focus on Prolog since it is so easy to
learn and Lisp because there exists an extensive on-line library of available
programs in natural language processing. Students will run existing parsers
available on the WWW and write their own grammars and parsers in Prolog. The
equipment in the ACF Innovation Lab
will be demonstrated.

write a parser in Prolog that will input sentences and output a phrase
marker and a logical form for the input sentences

use the Internet as a resource to study 'state of the art' parsers that
assign structures and meanings to complex morphological and syntactic structures

write enough HTML to develop a set of World Wide Web pages to place your
project reports and term paper project on your WWW site

Background Assumptions

This course description assumes:

The student has read materials by Chomsky in at least one course in
linguistics, psycholinguistics, philosophy, or cognitive science.

The student knows little, if anything, about Prolog, Lisp, UNIX, and has
little experience using the World Wide Web.

The student has an hour or so a week to meet with the Prof. in the NYU
computer labs to learn how to use the extensive comptuer resources of the
Academic Computing Facilities.

The student is willing to spend the time outside of class to run the
programs and to visit the websites discussed in class.

For Advanced Students

If you are an advanced student, you should contact Prof. Dougherty. The
Course Project page is aimed at beginners to
comutational linguistics and natural language processing. I have an abundance of
more advanced projects that could be used to satisfy the course requirements.
This term (Spring, 1997) I am particularly interested in developing CGI scripts
to enable net browsers to use the NYU parsers. I would like the users to input a
standard orthographic sentence, such as: Sean, Tess, and Tracy left, and have
the parser return the possible phrase markers for this sentence in a graphic
format, perhaps jpg or gif. The parsers might return information about
ambiguity, constituent structure, logical form, and so on.

This Courses Has a Sharp Focus

We will implement the ideas of Noam Chomsky and Zellig Harris in Prolog, and
to a lesser extent, Lisp. Experience has shown that Prolog is easier to learn
than Lisp for just about everyone. Once you a have learned Prolog, all the
information carries over into Lisp. The teaching strategy is to move the
students from the familiar to the unfamiliar.

Our ideas about lexical structure derive from Noam Chomsky, Maurice Gross,
and Zellig Harris. We are not concerned to implement any ideas about morphology,
syntax, semantics, or logical form except those underlying Chomsky's 'Minimalist
Program' and 'Logical Structure of a Linguistic Theory'.

We only discuss Prolog as a tool to represent recent linguistic theory. This
is not a general course in Prolog or Lisp. Students will learn to program in
these language in order to encode lexicons and principles of sentence
construction for English, French, and German grammars. We have no interest in
discussing classical problems like the Towers of Hanoi, the Queens problem, and
so on.

The Reading Materials

The main readings from the course will come from one book and two
manuscripts. The basic organizational idea underlying these books is:

to make all programs, Prolog interpreters, graphics, diagrams, and so
on in the book freely available to everyone over the world wide web

keep the web site up to date with the latest, updated, debugged programs

to sell the books to those people who do not know how to use the materials

If you already know a lot about Chomsky's theories, Prolog, Lisp, and
parsing, you can download the materials and use them in your teaching, research,
and so on. If you are somewhat in the dark concerning recent linguistic theory,
parsing strategies, and so on, then these books are the key to awakening your
intelligence to the dawn of computational linguistics. cognitive psychology, and
symbolic processing languages. Some of our pages use complicated graphics and
displays, see the HTML
Gesellschaft.

In short, these books are the manuals and workbooks to use the extensive
array of free software on the world wide web concerning computational
linguistics. These free programs are first class items comparable to
interpreters and compilers that cost hundrends of dollars. We are giving you a
Jaguar for free and selling you driving lessons. If you already know how to
drive, simply take the car and recommend us to your friends. The Jaguar is free,
the books are for those who need driving lessons.

Gazdar and Mellish (1989) differs considerably from Dougherty (1994) in many
respects. In brief,

Dougherty presents the cognitive psychology (mentalist) underpinnings
of Chomsky's theory and defines all relevant terms, such as competence,
performance, etc. Gazdar and Mellish do not regard their study as contributing
to cognitive psychology or mind, and they avoid discussing the psycholinguistic
implications of their study.

Dougherty discusses Chomsky's theory in some detail and then implements
aspects of Chomsky's ideas into Prolog lexicons and rules of combination. The
whole book is basically a series of small grammars written to explicate basic
linguistic notions of selection, lexical structure, coordination, subordination,
complementizer, and so on.

Gazdar and Mellish have very little to say about Chomsky's theory, for
instance, Chomsky is not cited in their index and is only mentioned in a couple
of footnotes.

Gazdar and Mellish also assume that a student has had, or is taking, a
course in Prolog while using their book. Dougherty assumes a student has never
heard of Prolog or Lisp.

Dougherty includes a disk that automatically loads all Prolog Interpreters
and Prolog programs directly into an IBM PC. Prolog and Lisp interpreters, as
well as all programs, are included with the book and also downloadable from the
NYU WWW site.